NASA

This Saturday, NASA plans to launch the Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft designed to touch the edge of the solar corona, the aura of plasma that surrounds the sun. It will be the first-ever spacecraft to enter into the orbits of Venus and Mercury, a feat scientists have dreamt of for decades.

John Cho Is (Finally) the Leading Man

Star Trek actor John Cho, ‘96, stars in director Kognada’s Sundance hit debut, Columbus, in theaters now. Cho plays a translator who rushes from Seoul, Korea to his hometown of Columbus, Indiana to take care of his father, who is in a coma. Though best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the recent Star Trek revamps, Cho got his start as a fill-in for an extra in a UC Berkeley play. He went on to travel with the Berkeley Repertory Theater and star in the Harold and Kumar film franchise.

If you’re in North America, chances are you’ve heard that there will be a solar eclipse on August 21. You may even be traveling—or know people who are traveling—a goodly distance for the best view of what is essentially a monumental overcast.

So what’s the big deal?

Glad you asked! We’ve got answers to your most burning questions about the solar event of the century.

In the mid-2000s, William Fisk, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, stumbled upon two obscure Hungarian studies that challenged common assumptions about the air indoors. The studies suggested that, even at relatively low levels, carbon dioxide could impair how well people thought and worked.

Space has long been the province of dreamers. Science fiction writers have authored visions of our future with faster-than-light travel, colonies on other planets, and massive space elevators shuttling people to orbit.

If there’s an appropriate place to apply the Precautionary Principle, beaming high-powered messages to exoplanets that could support intelligent life might seem a good place to start. Or maybe not. It all depends on one’s cosmic perspective.

Today UC Berkeley scientists are announcing that they have probably identified, in samples returned from a NASA probe, particles of interstellar matter—the first samples of “stardust” from beyond our solar system.

Obtaining the dust motes has been an achievement of staggering technical proficiency in extracting the infinitesimal from the infinite.

Editors’ Note: The Summer 2014 issue of California magazine is called “This is the End.” Every day this week: a different catastrophic scenario.

It started with a flash.

At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, Russia, a southern industrial city known mostly for making tractors. Thanks to smartphones, surveillance cameras, and Russian auto-dash cams, we have a voluminous record of what happened next.

CALIFORNIA Classic

A year ago, the government reopened after a two-day shutdown. In its wake, we looked closely at Trump’s influence, asking questions like: How much of an impact is Trump exerting on our underlying institutions? Are his actions a pause in government-as-usual, or could they change the essential nature of the American polity?

Said Paul Prierson, UC Berkeley professor of political science, in 2018, “I’m especially worried about the corrosion of our system of checks and balances, given that people are exhibiting loyalty first and foremost to party and coalition rather than the institutions they represent.”